About

Safdar Ahmed is a Sydney-based artist, musician and academic.

In 2010 he completed his PhD with the Department of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Sydney. His dissertation, which linked the work of various Muslim reformist thinkers to contemporary paradigms of modernity, was published by IB Tauris beneath the title Reform and Modernity in Islam.

Before that, Safdar completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Sydney’s National Art School. He works largely in the mediums of drawing, comics and watercolour.

He is a founding member of the Refugee Art Project, for which he conducts art workshops with refugees and asylum seekers in detention. This organization was founded to facilitate art workshops for detained asylum seekers, and to display their work in public exhibitions. Detainees would be able to express themselves through the medium of art, and to convey something of their experiences to the broader Australian community. The Refugee Art Project aims to deepen public understanding about the asylum seeker issue and the realities of Australia’s detention regime.

Here is a short video documenting Hazeen‘s gig and communal zombie-cake eating performance, which took place in April 2017. The zombie is employed as a signifier for racist, Islamophobic hallucinations of an acopalyptic Muslim takeover, which we reverse engineered in a macabre zombie-brain eating ceremony. You can read about my theory linking Orientalism/Islamophobia and the modern zombie here.